Adventures in Vegan Cooking: Seitan Pot Pie

Last weekend, I went to my friend Daniel's apartment to make seitan pot pie.  I had never tried seitan before, and I've decided it is my new favorite fake meat.  Daniel got the recipe off the blog Vegan Sweetie, who, in turn, got it from Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero's book, Veganomicon.  Considering it was my first time making a pot pie, or pie crust for that matter, I think we did an awesome job and it turned out deliciously! 

In case you've never made a seitan pot pie before (and I'm guessing not many of you have), you will need the following incredients...

There is, of course, the seitan...

Add potatoes, carrots, celery, onion, corn, edamame...

Spinach works too!

Don't forget the vegetable broth!

Combine all into a hearty, stew-like concoction.

Consumption of alcohol whilst cooking also helps.

Oh, right, it's a pot pie!  So, at some point...a pie crust should be assembled...this process was surprisingly difficult, involving chopping the shortening into the flour mixture.  According to the recipe, however, it would make, like...the best pie crust ever.

Voila!  You have a pie crust!

And then...assemble!

We discovered that cooking can be stressful.

But it's all worth it, because in the end you have delicious seitan pot pie!

Pop a slice on a plate...and enjoy!

My Year in Lists: Favorite Albums of 2009

After much deliberation, I have finally finished my yearly "Best Albums of the Year" list. I feel compelled to do this every year, which I suppose is silly, since I'm sure no one cares. But, you know, I get a weird pleasure out of making lists. Let's go!

10. PJ Harvey & John Parish - A Woman A Man Walked By
This second collaboration between Harvey and Parish can be a bit challenging to listen to. It's full of restless energy, haunting melodies, and some weird vocals/instrumentation. But it's really grew on me. While it's not an entirely even effort, PJ Harvey has never sounded better and lyrically, she's going some really interesting places.
Try: Black Hearted Love, A Woman A Man Walked By / The Crow Knows Where All the Little Children Go, Sixteen, Fifteen, Fourteen

9. The Pains of Being Pure At Heart - The Pains of Being Pure At Heart
I like the Pains of Being Pure At Heart because they sound like nostalgia. Or like the soundtrack to a modern-times John Hughes movie.
Try: Young Adult Friction, The Tenure Itch

8. Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca
I was against Dirty Projectors for a long time. Not for any real legitimate reason, but just because they were hyped up a lot in indie music blogs and Pitchfork and the like, so I figured they would probably be overrated. And then I heard an acoustic version of their song "No Intention" on Sirius XMU and decided I needed to reevaluate my opinion of them and get their album. And I discovered it's actually quite brilliant.
Try: No Intention, Cannibal Resource, Stillness is the Move

7. The Antlers - Hospice
This is a concept album, built around the story of someone dying of bone cancer. The songs are equal parts softness and sparseness and emotional, desperate crescendos. It makes for some depressing listening, but it's the good kind of hurt.
Try: Two, Kettering, Sylvia

6. We Were Promised Jetpacks - These Four Walls
I saw these guys open for The Twilight Sad earlier this year and they blew me away. This is a pretty solid debut and is particularly enjoyable if you're like me and you like grandiose, emotional rock music performed by guys with Scottish accents.
Try: Roll Up Your Sleeves, It's Thunder and It's Lightning

5. Bat For Lashes - Two Suns
This album has probably made Natasha Khan (aka Bat For Lashes) my new favorite female artist. There's a lot of duality, faery-ness, and metaphysical lushness going on here...these songs are simply some of the most gorgeous things I've heard this year.
Try: Daniel, Pearl's Dream, Siren Song

4. Passion Pit - Manners
Danceable beats! Falsetto voices! Children's choirs! Electro-pop goodness! Most of the things that I would normally find annoying in indie bands I love about Passion Pit. Somehow they make it all come together into one amazingly infectious, addictive album.
Try: Sleepyhead, Little Secrets, Moth's Wings

3. Phoenix - Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
Simply put, the best French alternative rock band ever to write a song about Hungarian composer Franz Liszt. This might be the only album this year catchier than Passion Pit's. Which is not an easy feat.
Try: Listzomania, 1901, Armistice

2. Future of the Left - Travels With Myself and Another
Loud, fast, funny, rude, odd...this Welsh punk trio was my favorite new musical find of this year. And despite the wonderfulness of this album, you really should see them live. They're just a blast to see.
Try: Arming Eritrea, Throwing Bricks At Trains

1. Metric - Fantasies
I'm surprised I hadn't been converted to Metric before and lead singer Emily Haines' particularly sexy allure. All I can say is that this is a really great, solid rock album and has many many songs worthy of cranking up loud in your car and singing along to. Most of the songs from this album have been on repeat in my iPod for the last 6 months and they have not gotten old yet.
Try: Sick Muse, Gold Guns Girls, Satellite Mind

Honorable Mentions:
Au Revoir Simone - Still Night, Still Light
HEALTH - Get Color
Karen O and the Kids - Where the Wild Things Are (Original Soundtrack)
The Mountain Goats - The Life of the World to Come
The Middle East - The Recordings of the Middle East EP

Until next year, folks!

Year End Roundup: 2009

2009.

I think I might've been mistaken about you.

In my head, I thought I couldn't wait to be rid of you. That you were one of the worst years ever. The economy was crumbling. I had a horribly stressful job that I hated. Michael Jackson died. Creed got back together. People freaked out over health care reform. Glenn Beck became creepily popular. I began to worry a lot about the future.

Then I began looking at photos I had taken over this past year. Of all the things I've done and all the time I've spent with friends and the adventures we've had. And then I realized that I was wrong about this year. I had let too many little things get me down, too many things I couldn't control.

This year was actually really great. I've done many things I'd been too scared to do before and gone places I've never been able to before and had many, many good times.

So, let's epic-ly review...2009. In pictures!

JANUARY

I rang in the New Year, as usual, with Linnea. This time at a big party at Mallary's Arlington house.


January marked a few significant events. The most memorable of them involving a trip up to New York with Megan and Skye, where we watched ourselves get a brand spankin' new president. Other people migrated to our home base of the DC area to watch the inauguration. But we wanted to be different. Instead we watched it in Times Square, on all the huge big screens. Sure, there was weirdly no sound on any of the screens, but it was just as cool.



It was also during that trip where we saw this young wizard naked on Broadway (and I've never been able to watch a Harry Potter movie in quite the same way again).


FEBRUARY

One of my favorite things in February was my trip to Seattle, marking the first time I've ever taken a trip alone. It was scary as hell, but it was worth it and I had an amazing time.


I also got to see Dan Savage in person twice in one week!


MARCH

March was a good month. It marked many things. Including the first time that we went out for St. Patrick's Day, as a group.


It was also marked the anniversary of the birth of that dark forest of a man, Mr. William Shatner. I went and played Shatner-themed Cranium (dubbed "Crane"-ium, after Denny Crane of Boston Legal) at Lisa's fiance's apartment.


Megan and I took in a lot of events at the Kennedy Center. We also took in a lot of the view from their terrace.


Jenny and Chris also came to visit and I was reminded how much I missed having them around on a near-daily basis.


APRIL

April. I got to go to Megan's and make festive Easter cupcakes for the first time. Seriously, aren't these adorable?


It also began to get nice and warm again, which meant I could spend more time outdoors with friends.


MAY

May was a huge month. I went to Philadelphia one day, to watch a kinetic sculpture derby race.


And then a couple of days after that I went to Boston to go see The National.


On the way to the concert, I walked by Fenway Park. This would've been really cool if I was a Red Sox fan.


JUNE

June was also a crazy month. I saw a warehouse full of art in DC.


Mallary and I drove 6 hours to Watkins Glen, New York, to camp out with other crazed fans and see The Mountain Goats play in a barn.


Mallary and I also tried out Ethiopian beer for the first time, which was delish.


JULY

July was EPIC. Mostly because of Marianne and I's trip to Ireland.



I also moved out of my mom's house and Skye and I moved into a big, grown-up apartment together!


Boaz, one of my rats, passed away suddenly. I still miss his spazziness and complete inability to sit still.


AUGUST

August involved getting settled in to the new apartment.


Megan, Skye, Megan's mom, and I also went down to Colonial Williamsburg for a weekend. It was the first time I've ever been there, even though I'm a Virginian and you think I would've gone like...a bajillionty times by now.


We got to see the American Revolution begin, as it does every day in Colonial Williamsburg...promptly at noon.


Megan left for Morocco, and I thought that I would have to spend the entire next year missing her (but then she came back a year early and my heart was whole again!)


SEPTEMBER

In September, Skye's friend Allison came to stay with us while looking for a place and a job in DC.


Megan, Anna, and I went to New York to see some Broadway shows


Though sadly, not Spiderman, which has yet to open.


Marianne moved to Spain to be a teacher, and so we had our last ever meal at Tippy's Taco in Fairfax. I really miss Marianne and I's Tippy's trips, which we would take whenever she was home from college.


Marlowe also passed away this month. I'll always miss Marlowe, even if I get rats again. Marlowe would've made a great ambassador for rats. He was so wonderfully affectionate and sweet.



OCTOBER

We were officially into fall now, which brought many things, including a trip back to Fredericksburg to visit old college haunts.


Burlesque shows...


The Equality March in DC (which actually did pass marriage equality legislation, huzzah!)


And of course, that greatest of holidays, Halloween. Symbolized here by a carved orange pepper (Harris Teeter was out of pumpkins).


NOVEMBER

I think I suffered from a lack of picture-taking initiative in November. It seems as if the only pictures I have are from the camera on my phone from concerts I went to. But I did go to a crap-ton of concerts in November!

Public Enemy (sorry, it's with an iPhone so it's a very dark, blurry pic of Flava Flav...but you can see the big-ass clock!)


The Mountain Goats...the 3rd time I'd seen them that year.


And Saul Williams, as his alter-ego Niggy Tardust


I also saw Cold Cave and Metric in November, but sadly have no photos of either or those. Sigh.

DECEMBER

And now we finish off the year!

We had not one, but two snow-storms this month. The later, being the more intense, blizzard-y, 2-foot of snow affair, referred to nation-wide (or Twitter-wide, at least) as the great Snowpocalypse.


Megan turned 24!


And Skye and I put up our very own Christmas tree!


So that's my pictorial year in review! It's actually been a pretty fun year I think, and I've realized that I've actually done a lot of cool stuff, met some neat new people, and had plenty of hijinx.

So here's to 2009 and hoping that 2010 will be even more epic!

Office Decorations

The last two years of college, I worked for the secetary of the University's Department of Psychology. I had a desk and a computer. Pencils, staplers, a scanner. You know, the usual stuff. There was a filing cabinet directly across from my desk, with this poster taped to it:



The poster was somewhat fitting in that office, seeing at how it was the Department of Psychology and all. And if you're a Psych student or professor, you clearly should know the signs of depression. Or even if you're not, I'm sure it's just a good thing to know. Weirdly enough, looking at it makes me nostalgic. It wasn't the most exciting job, but it was very non-stressful and I really liked working with kooky professors every day. I wish I could steal the poster to put it up on the wall of my office now. Since I dislike my current job so much, maybe I would just put it up there so I could keep tabs on myself, lest I develop the tell-tale signs of depression that these cartoon poster people have! Or perhaps I could just pretend I was back at the Psych Deptartment, alphabetizing scantron sheets and making copies of scholarly articles about weird behavioral experiments. Or maybe just pretend I was back in college again.

Top 5: Christmas Songs

Again, I've been horrible about posting. Sorry! However, I bring you, just in time for the holidays, a new Top 5 list! Here are my Top 5 favorite Christmas Songs! I'm also currently working on my yearly "Top 10 Albums of the Year" for 2009, so hopefully I'll have that finished before the end of the year.

Without further ado...!

5. "The Little Drummer Boy" - Bing Crosby and David Bowie
I think I've mentioned this before on my "Favorite Duets" list, but I just love this. There's nothing better than two legends singing a traditional Christmas song. And the banter before the song actually begins in this video is just adoreable.


4. "What's This?" - Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas
Does this count as a Christmas song, technically? I'm not sure. I do know though that the thing that I love about The Nightmare Before Christmas is that you can watch it around Halloween AND Christmas and it works pretty well for both holidays. However, I think this song is the most "Christmas-y" of the bunch. And you've gotta love lines like "There's children throwing snowballs, instead of throwing heads!"


3. "Santa Baby" - Eartha Kitt
God, do I miss Eartha Kitt. She was just awesome in every way. This song appeals to everyone's inner-materialist...which is, of course, appropriate for Christmas. But Miss Kitt also brings her own own unique brand of playful sexiness to the tune.


2. "White Christmas" - Bing Crosby
Hey, you can't go wrong with classic Bing Crosby. There's just something about this song that just feel so soothing and cozy.


1. "Happy Christmas (War Is Over)" - John Lennon
This song is a great Christmas song. It's like...the exact opposite of Paul McCartney's Christmas song. It's somehow both hopeful and sad at the same time and the children's chorus gets me every time.


And now I invite you all to share your favorite holiday jams!

Marlowe

I've put off a post about Marlowe for a long time now, because I didn't feel up to it. On September 23, I had him put to sleep, after his pneumonia became too advanced to be treated.

I still miss you, Marlowe.

These are the last pictures I took of them, with the camera on my cell phone. He was naturally a cuddly, affectionate rat. In his last few months, however, when I would let him out of the cage, he would often want to come rest on my pillow or, if I was also laying on my bed, in the crook of my shoulder.